


All The Broken Ones

by icewhisper



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: Depression, F/M, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Other, Recovery, post-shooting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-04
Updated: 2017-07-04
Packaged: 2018-11-23 08:26:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11398818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icewhisper/pseuds/icewhisper
Summary: When Alex falls apart, he does it slowly—subtly—right up until the explosion. What comes after wasn't something anybody planned for.





	All The Broken Ones

When Alex falls apart, he does it slowly—subtly—right up until the explosion.

Lexie blames herself, shaking and sobbing into Mark’s chest in the waiting room while their friends pump a bottle of sleeping pills out of Alex’s stomach. There’s a bathroom mirror shattered all over the floor at home, shards red with blood from where they split Alex’s knuckles.

Mark cleans up the mirror that night after Lexie’s cried herself to sleep, somewhere between numb and shaking.

“It wasn’t anyone’s fault,” he tells her, but it’s Meredith that speaks up and says that they should have seen something was wrong. They were his friends. They were his family. They were his people. He didn’t have anyone else.

“We should have noticed.”

Alex is unconscious for a day and a half, hours ticking away like a morbid countdown to see if his heart gives out. He didn’t have a strong heart. None of them knew, but somehow, none of them were surprised either. It would have sounded poetic if Alex hadn’t tried to kill himself months after Mark had stuck his hand in the guy’s chest to try and keep him alive.

For a second, he’s angry about it. At Alex for what he did. At himself for wasting time trying to save a guy that didn’t want to be saved when he should have been getting Lexie to safety.

The anger lessens with the next beep of the monitor as guilt seeps into his chest. They didn’t ask for this. They didn’t ask for the shooting or the damage that stuck around after.

He’s the only one in the room when Alex wakes up, slipped inside for a minute because Lexie was heading into surgery and couldn’t go herself. The sun is shining and Alex looks more surprised that Mark is there than by the fact that he lived.

“I was gonna go as crazy as the rest of them someday.”

There are whispers around the house later, talk of mental illness and schizophrenia. Alex said he wasn’t hearing voices, that he knew the symptoms well enough to know he wasn’t. He thinks. He hopes.

They all hope.

They try not to look at the weight of everything as Alex finally comes back to the house. Try to not think about the last time he’d been there or Cristina screaming for them when she was the one that found him.

April still can’t look him in the eye.

Jackson replaced the mirror.

Meredith hovers by the door whenever Alex goes to the bathroom.

Cristina asks once over way too much tequila why Alex used pills.

“I don’t like guns.” He adds on a comment about messes and not wanting more scars if he survived it, and it felt like a reminder that he hadn’t wanted to. That he still wished he’d died on the bathroom floor. The realization that he was still in that place shakes Mark more than he expects it to and, this time, he’s the one squeezing Lexie’s hand.

“Do you even give a shit about your friends?” he asks suddenly.

Alex snorts and stands, but Mark watches his eyes go from his and Lexie’s hands and breeze over the rest of them before he raises them up to the ceiling. He shrugs. “Yep.” Somehow, Mark thinks he cares too much and not at all at the same time.

He doesn’t say it.

“Do you think we caused it?” Lexie asks him later, too ashamed to curl into his side, even in the privacy of her bedroom. “Us getting back together…”

“He’s depressed, Lexie,” he tells her, but the reply isn’t a no and it isn’t a yes. He can’t make the judgement of what made Alex swallow a bottle of pills.

“Meredith is still sleeping in his room.”

“I know.”

“He’s not okay.”

It’s not anything they don’t know already.

Mark finds him hyperventilating on the kitchen floor two weeks after he comes home. He isn’t anyone Alex wants for comfort, but the sympathetic twist in his gut still makes him sit down next to him. He doesn’t ask how Alex snuck out of the room without waking Meredith.

“Did you take anything?” he asks between trying to calm Alex’s breathing.

Alex shakes his head and his breath shudders.

Mark doesn’t ask if he’d been planning to. They don’t have so much as an aspirin in the house since he came home. No pills, but they still have too much tequila.

He wonders if they see the flaw in their plans.

The sun is rising by the time Alex finally calms down, slumped against Mark’s shoulder and too tired to move. He falls asleep there and Mark can’t find it in him to wake him. They’ve never been friends, but Alex is struggling with something they haven’t put a name to yet.

(Over a year later, Alex would tell them his shrink had finally settled on bipolar disorder and things make a little more sense.)

Lexie finds them, breath hitching and Mark shakes his head before she can ask. “He’s fine,” he says, as truthful as he could be. “Just tired.”

She doesn’t mention the protective hand he has curled around Alex’s side, like he’s holding the scars that seemed to start the whole downward spiral.

“I don’t know how someone gets that sad,” she whispers. “I know the chemical imbalances that come with depression, but wanting to… I don’t _get it_.” She sniffs and flattens a hand over her chest. “Did he think we wouldn’t care?”

“I’m not the one you should be asking.”

She never asks Alex, but she does help him rouse the guy enough to bring him back upstairs. She steers them towards her room instead with a look of determination that only kind of puts an uneasy feeling in Mark’s chest.

“She still loves you,” he mutters to Alex when she slips out of the room to wake Meredith.

“She chose you.”

He hadn’t thought Alex was still awake, thought he’d slipped back down. The fact that he hadn’t denied loving Lexie doesn’t go unnoticed. “Is that why you did it?”

“No.”

“So why did you?”

The shrug he gets in response isn’t an answer at all, but Alex doesn’t offer anything else before he falls back asleep.

“Meredith got paged,” Lexie whispers when she slips in later. “I told her we’d stay with him.”

Mark wants to say Alex doesn’t need a babysitter, but he can’t bring himself to voice the lie. He nods, watching as Lexie slips back in and gets on Alex’s other side rather than next to him. He tries to not let it bother him. It still does.

Alex doesn’t get out of bed the next day. Or the one after that. Or the one after that. He doesn’t speak, sleeping when he can and staring listlessly at the wall when his body decides he’s had enough.

Lexie tries to talk to him, soft little encouragements that barely get any food down his throat.

Mark thinks Alex might wither away to nothing in between them on Lexie’s mattress.

Meredith kicks him out of the room on the third day and settles in next to Alex with a book in her lap. He takes the exile as an end to babysitting duties he didn’t want in the first place and joins Derek in the kitchen with a sigh.

“He’s not my responsibility,” he mutters when Derek tries to say something about him staying with Alex. “This isn’t even my house.”

“You still stayed.”

“Because Lexie wouldn’t forgive me if he offed himself.” He shakes his head. “He needs a hospital. None of us specialized in psych.”

Derek thins his lips, but he sees the agreement in the other man’s eyes. They don’t say it, like voicing it would mean they have to take it out of the girls’ hands, because there’s no way Alex should be making any decisions for himself. He’s already decided to try and kill himself once. His decision-making skills aren’t at their best, at the moment.

He drags Alex into the shower that night, one arm around his waist and eyes on Lexie as she runs a soapy cloth over her ex-boyfriend’s chest.

He should have put Alex back in his own room after, but he let Lexie steer them back to hers instead. Somehow, he doesn’t get the feeling Alex was ever going to move out.

“You can’t keep doing this, Lex,” he says softly one night as Alex sleeps between them. He’d at least managed to get out of bed on his own that day to go to his therapy appointment.

“I can be there for him.”

“In our bed?” he asked, because it had reached at that point. He’d somehow gotten so integrated into the schedule of keeping an eye on Alex that he spent more time at the house than he didn’t. Their bed; his and Lexie’s and his, Lexie’s, and Alex’s. “Loving him isn’t going to fix him.”

She stiffens, but she doesn’t say he was wrong and his heart breaks a little bit. It shouldn’t have, he thinks. He’d figured her out weeks ago. “I know.”

He picks a fight with Alex the next morning, too full of wounded pride to worry that his comments are cutting too deep. To his credit, Alex doesn’t break down in front of him, but he also doesn’t get out of bed for the next week either.

Alex sleeps in his own room with Lexie curled up against him.

Mark sleeps alone at his apartment and wonders if their lives will ever be normal again. He loves his girlfriend who loves him and her ex, but her ex doesn’t love himself enough to want to live.

Sometimes, he wishes he never moved to Seattle.

He still goes back to the house a few days later, eyes on the floor and muttering an apology he doesn’t think Alex listens to. The guy is too busy trying to control his breaths to hold back a wave of anger or tears and Mark doesn’t want to find out which.

He still does.

Turns out, it’s both, because a stream of insults somehow ends in tears Alex seems to hate himself for shedding, but he’s too fucked up to make them stop. Mark hugs him and they both pretend he didn’t press his lips to Alex’s hair. They already pretend that Alex will be okay if his friends love him enough and pretend that Lexie isn’t still completely in love with him. They can pretend with this too.

Unsurprisingly, it all blows up in their face and Mark comes back from a long shift one day to find Alex drunk on the couch and half out of his head. Lexie is next to him, cheeks wet and prying the tequila bottle from Alex’s hand. It’s more empty than it’s full and fuck if that doesn’t explain their lives since Alex swallowed a bottle of pills and everyone’s lives went to pieces.

“You’re not getting better,” Mark tells him later when Alex is bent over the toilet.

“Fuck off.”

“He’s right,” Lexie admits and it sounds like her heart’s breaking. She kneels next to him, one hand stroking up and down Alex’s spine, and the other hand on his cheek so he has to look at her. “You need help, Alex.” More help than they can give.

Alex knows it. Lexie cries and Alex sobs between bouts of puking.

Mark packs a bag for him and wonders why he feels like he failed, because he wasn’t supposed to care about this at all. He ended up caring by mistake and there’s a lump in his throat when he’s left alone with Alex so Lexie can call Meredith.

He holds Alex’s hand because it’s shaking and pretends Alex doesn’t hold onto him like letting go would mean falling apart.

“Get her away from me,” Alex pleads at a whisper. “Before I ruin her too.”

“She’s not going anywhere,” Mark tells him and wishes that she would, but he doesn’t think either of them could leave Alex at this point. In too deep, he tells himself. Lexie loved something broken and he’d let himself care.

Caring always bit him in the ass.

Lexie goes to visit him alone as much as she drags Mark with her. He doesn’t tell her he goes on his own sometimes and he doesn’t think Alex mentions it either. Knows neither of them mentions the bad days when Alex doesn’t talk and Mark somehow ends up holding his hand or the mumbled stories of Iowa and corn fields and feeling like he’s losing his fucking mind.

“I don’t want to be like them,” Alex confesses once, his voice at no more than a whisper.

“Your mom and your brother,” Mark clarifies and sighs when Alex gives a nod. “Are you hearing voices?”

“No.”

“Then, you’re not.”

It doesn’t make Alex feel better—not that Mark expected it to fix anything—but he lets it go. They don’t talk for the rest of the visit, but their fingers end up laced together at some point and Mark gives Alex’s hand a squeeze before he gets up to leave.

“Sloan?”

“Yeah?”

“Why the hell did you save me?”

The words are whispered, but they seem to echo in the tiny room. “Because,” Mark says, “you’re not done yet.” Karev’s an ass and he didn’t treat Lexie right in the end, but he was a damn good doctor and he wasn’t done saving lives. He had the rest of his damn life ahead of him if he’d stop trying to end it.

He leaves Alex to think about it and life continues. It’s not much different with Alex in the hospital than it was when he was lying in Lexie’s bed back home. They still see him and the others still worry, but they know he’s getting more help than they could have offered.

The hospital holds onto his job, but his file gets packed full of disability documents and psych evaluations. They all know the hoops he’ll have to jump through before anyone clears him to return to work, but that’s a distant thought, drowned out by the knowledge that Alex still has more bad days than good.

Lexie mentions quietly one day that Alex’s doctors put him on medication and Mark feels himself hoping it’s a turning point.

“Everyone gets medicated at some point,” he tells her as she curls into his side.

“He asked for his guitar yesterday. He hasn’t wanted to play it in months.” She doesn’t mention they’d never allow it in the ward, but he lets Lexie take the win. It’s progress.

“You hear him play before?”

She hums, finger tracing little patterns on his chest. “He used to play when he couldn’t sleep.” Her finger stills. “I kissed him,” she admits softly. Guiltily.

He’s not surprised. He’d seen it coming months ago and suspected as much when she couldn’t look him in the eye the other day. “It’s okay,” he tells her, but he’s pretty sure he’s lying.

Part of him wants to confront Alex about it the next time he visits, but it’s one of the random good days and he finds Alex in a window seat with a book. He doesn’t want to ruin it and they talk about the book instead, casually talking about different suture techniques and the process of reassembling someone who’s had a limb sliced off by mistake.

He tells Alex about the latest scandal at the hospital—Olivia might be pregnant and they’re taking bets on who the father is—and he gets a smile out of the guy that makes him smile in return.

“Why do you keep coming here?” Alex asks him when they walk back to his room.

“You’re not as annoying as you used to be,” he replies, but they both know it’s not the answer. Still, it’s better than admitting that he doesn’t know or that he got used to seeing Alex constantly. It’s a hell of a lot better than admitting late-night thoughts that the bed feels oddly big for two people now that they aren’t cramming in three. Definitely better than admitting that he’d ended up caring about Alex too.

Alex catches him by the wrist, the corner of his lips barely twitching up with a smile. “You’re still an ass.”

Alex kisses him—just for a second—but Mark kisses back and cements how thoroughly screwed they all are.

He tells Lexie when they’re in bed later and endures her questions about sexuality—bisexual—and why they kissed—he doesn’t know, but he was surprised Alex had initiated it—and if he wanted it to happen again. He pauses at the last question, prepared to say no, but he isn’t sure if it would be a lie. He settles on the truth, ready to watch her explode, but she gives him a lost look and asks, “What now?”

He has no idea.

It’s not the answer she wanted.

They don’t broach the topic with Alex, but they visit him together on a Saturday they’re both off. The meds are working and it seems like Alex is starting to dig his way out of the hole he’d fallen into. Lexie kisses his cheek when he mentions he might get out soon and Mark squeezes his hand.

“Good,” she says, smiling. “We’ve missed you.”

Alex makes an amused noise that almost sounds like the old him and Mark’s surprised to find that he’s missed it. “We?”

“You’re like a fungus, Karev,” he huffs, but there’s a quirk to his lips that gets a smaller one out of Alex. It’s not the cocky smile that used to make Mark want to bury Alex in grunt work, but it’s better than the listlessness there had been before. Progress, he thinks, because that’s the only thing any of them can hope for anymore; progress and healing and trying to keep themselves from falling into the bottom of a bottle when their lives fall apart again.

 

 

Lexie is half-asleep at his side when they walk in one day after a couple too-long shifts and hear guitar music coming from the upper floor of what was supposed to be an empty house. Her eyes widen before she smiles and he echoes it, but she’s the one that darts up the stairs with a burst of energy she hadn’t had when he’d all but dragged her from the car.

Her arms are wrapped around Alex by the time he makes it to the bedroom, guitar abandoned beside him on the mattress, and talking too fast for either of them to grasp. Mark’s pretty sure he hears _welcome home_ somewhere in between her and Alex’s indulging answers that, yes, he caught a cab and, yes, he’s got a bag full of meds.

“Doesn’t explain how you ended up in here,” he tells him, smirking as he leans against the doorframe. “Your room’s down the hall.”

Alex meets his eyes, still tired and still a little drawn, but there’s a hint of a spark none of them have seen since bullets started flying around the hospital. “Gonna kick me out, Sloan?”

“You planning on hogging the bed?” he asks at the same time Lexie answers with a sputtered _no_. He wonders if she’s only just realizing how it looks if Alex moves in just to move in, rather than him just being there because they don’t trust him on his own.

“If you keep sticking me in the middle.”

They do stick him in the middle and he hogs the bed as much as he always did, but he pulls himself to his feet most mornings. Mark would be happy—maybe a little relieved—if he wasn’t doing it at the ass crack of dawn. Lexie murmurs some tired explanation of morning runs and exercise releasing endorphins that help with depression. He still grumbles about it, anyway.

None of them mention that they might slot in together a little too close at night or the brush of lips against lips of people they shouldn’t be kissing. It’s like they’re scared of breaking the fragile hold of whatever seems to be going on, because things usually have a way of going to shit.

It nearly does one day when all of them are running on too-little sleep—him and Lexie because of work and Alex because he just can’t some nights—and too much tequila. Mark can’t quite remember how he and Alex made it back to the bedroom or where Alex’s shirt went, but Alex is gasping into his mouth while Mark works him with his hand.

He doesn’t have time to return the favor before Lexie catches them, wide-eyed and too drunk to consider that Mark’s watched her make out with Alex more than once in the months since he’s come home and gotten himself back on his feet. There are teary eyes and swearing and they very pointedly don’t talk about it until Alex is in a meeting with the hospital shrink to prove he can go back to work and it’s just him and Lexie at the house.

“What do we do now?” she asks, scared and whispered, like speaking any louder will ruin everything.

“Pretty sure it’s not just up to us,” he reminds her, because it’s really not. Alex’s intriguing lack of a sexuality crisis aside, whatever’s going on is about more than just the two of them. They’ve fallen into some kind of triangle that feels a thousand more complicated than the mess between him, Derek, and Addison had ever been. Some days, he aches for the predictable drama of that.

“But you and me…”

“That’s not going to change,” he tells her and hopes he’s telling the truth.

“You have feelings for him?”

He shrugs a shoulder, because he’s not sure exactly what he feels for Alex. He likes him and he definitely wants to fuck him at one point or another, but it’s been over a decade since he’s looked at a guy and considered making it something more. He likes Alex, but he loves Lexie and he’s not sure if it adding Alex in is worth risking what he already has. Except, he’s gotten used to Alex and the nights where Alex retreats to his old room—the ones where he needs some time alone or it’s one of those nights when he just can’t settle—the bed feels too big.

With a little alcohol in his system, he might even admit he misses Alex’s elbow jabbing into his ribs at all hours.

The conversation gets shelved and continues to get shelved for months. Time and time again, they find some reason to not bring Alex in on the conversation to make the step and figure out what’s going on. There’s a big surgery coming up. Alex just went back to work. Lexie got the flu. Mark’s got a conference. It’s just a bad time.

They make it through Christmas without anything groundbreaking happening. There are a few kisses under the mistletoe that the others definitely see and definitely have questions about, but no one’s actually asking. Mark’s pretty sure Meredith already knows, that she’s invoked that weird person-law with Alex and gotten the details from his side of it. Lexie might have tried to get some insight that way, but if she got any, she didn’t tell him, so he’s still in the dark.

Alex tells them the bipolar diagnosis one night while Lexie’s curled into his side and his arm is arm is tossed up across Mark’s chest. Lexie kisses his shoulder and Mark buries his fingers in Alex’s hair, but he spends the next weeks waiting for the other shoe to drop. He keeps an eye on Alex and his meds, like he’s preparing himself for the day Alex gets too busy with work and forgets. He waits for that time where one day turns into two and that turns into the textbook crash. He waits for things to go to shit again, but they don’t. Alex stays on his meds with a kind of focus that might be a little obsessive, but he knows mental illness. Mark always forgets what Alex grew up with and the little alarm Alex keeps on his phone stops being a little oddity and more of a comfort.

Nothing changes. The world doesn’t end. A natural disaster doesn’t hit the hospital. Life just keeps moving along like it should. Alex stays in their bed. Lexie fucks him. Mark fucks him. They fuck each other, but never three at once. Only two— _always_ two—because three means conversations and labels that everyone has already seemed to attach to them.

In the end, two-and-two becoming three happens only a little like it did when Alex fell apart; it happens slowly—but not all that subtly—until it’s everything at once.

He’d expected tequila to be part of it, because tequila was a part of everything, but there’s only a half-drunk beer in his hand when he walks into the bedroom one night and he sees Alex with his head between Lexie’s legs. He takes a moment to stare at the naked bodies and muscles and the way Lexie moans before there’s eye contact and an invitation.

There were words they should have exchanged, boundaries and talks, but he abandons his beer on the dresser and loses his clothes instead. He joins them on the bed, kisses them both, and it becomes a mess of hands and limbs and moans. Bodies move. People come. They’re all sticky by the end, legs tangled, and Alex has been shoved into the middle like usual.

Lexie kisses them and watches while Mark traces the sparrow tattoo Alex had gotten to cover up the bullet scar on his chest. Alex still bats his hand away, same as he always does, but there’s none of the breath hitching and tensing that there used to be when the scar stood out on its own. It’s buried under colors now, like it’s meant to be some poetic bullshit about starting over or rising above. It’s not. They all know it’s not. Alex had only ever decided to cover it with ink and let the artist decide how to do it.

Fake symbolism and some version of a relationship that is as much as it isn’t. It’s a mess and it’s probably going to end with booze and tears, but he twines his fingers with Lexie on Alex’s hip and Alex steals his pillow.

They never get around to the actual talk portion of it all, but they learn through trial and error and tequila, and a year later, when their little unit has somehow managed to survive, Mark doesn’t so much ask them to move in with him as he does give them each a key to a new apartment with a master suite and a bigger bed.

They don’t actually say yes, but their stuff ends up overflowing the drawers and Alex starts talking about the new route he runs every morning.

Somehow, it works.

They just keep on surviving.

The End

**Author's Note:**

> Let it be said that I haven't written for Grey's since 2012 and haven't actively watched the show since shortly after the shooting. Every so often, though, I drift back to WaltzMatildah's fics and they ruin me all over again. I blame her entirely. This one also had a more present-tense voice I haven't used before, but that was inspired by her as well. It's honestly all her fault.


End file.
